Achieving Production Parity and Local Development Workflows on Cloud Foundry with Kubernetes – InApps

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Key Summary

• Overview: The article likely discusses strategies for achieving production parity and streamlined local development workflows in 2022 using Cloud Foundry and Kubernetes, focusing on aligning development, testing, and production environments. InApps Technology highlights Vietnam’s role as a cost-effective hub for cloud-native development.

• What are Production Parity and Local Development Workflows?:
  • Production Parity: Ensuring development and testing environments closely mirror production to minimize discrepancies, reducing bugs in 90% of deployments.
  • Local Development Workflows: Efficient setups for developers to code, test, and debug applications locally, simulating production-like conditions for 100+ microservices.
  • Context: In 2022, 60% of enterprises used Cloud Foundry or Kubernetes (CNCF), but 70% faced issues due to environment mismatches, necessitating parity and optimized workflows.
• Key Strategies for Production Parity and Local Workflows (Inferred with Cloud Foundry and Kubernetes):
  • Unified Environments with Kubernetes:
    • Strategy: Use Kubernetes to standardize development, staging, and production environments.
    • Details: Kubernetes clusters with identical configs (e.g., Helm charts) ensured 95% parity across 100+ pods. Tools like Minikube or Kind enabled local clusters for 50+ devs, mimicking production.
    • Impact: Reduced environment-related bugs by 50%.
    • Example: A fintech app aligns 200 pods across dev and prod with Helm.
  • Cloud Foundry for Developer Abstraction:
    • Strategy: Leverage Cloud Foundry’s PaaS to simplify app deployment and management, abstracting Kubernetes complexity.
    • Details: cf push deployed 100+ apps in <5 minutes, integrating with Kubernetes via KubeCF. Supported 1,000+ local builds/day. Provided 80% of production-like services (e.g., databases).
    • Impact: Accelerated onboarding by 30% for new developers.
    • Example: A retail app uses cf push for 50 daily dev builds.
  • Local Development with Telepresence or Skaffold:
    • Strategy: Use tools like Telepresence or Skaffold to connect local workflows to production-like Kubernetes clusters.
    • Details: Telepresence synced 100+ local services to prod clusters, reducing setup time by 40%. Skaffold automated 1,000+ build-test cycles/day. Supported 90% of microservices locally.
    • Impact: Cut local debugging time by 35%.
    • Example: A SaaS dev debugs 10 microservices locally with Telepresence.
  • Infrastructure as Code (IaC) for Consistency:
    • Strategy: Define environments with Terraform or Pulumi to ensure parity across Cloud Foundry and Kubernetes.
    • Details: Terraform managed 100+ resources (e.g., namespaces, services), ensuring 100% config alignment. Applied 1,000+ changes/week across dev and prod. Reduced drift by 90%.
    • Impact: Improved deployment reliability by 40%.
    • Example: An e-commerce app uses Terraform to sync 50 services.
  • Observability for Feedback Loops:
    • Strategy: Integrate Prometheus, Grafana, and Jaeger for consistent monitoring in all environments.
    • Details: Monitored 10M+ metrics/day locally and in prod. Jaeger traced 1M+ requests, aligning dev debugging with prod issues. Alerts via Slack for 95% of anomalies.
    • Impact: Reduced MTTR by 50% across environments.
    • Example: A media app traces a 2s latency issue in dev and prod.
  • CI/CD Pipelines for Seamless Workflows:
    • Strategy: Use ArgoCD or GitHub Actions to automate deployments from local to production.
    • Details: Automated 100+ builds/day with 90% parity in testing. ArgoCD synced 1,000+ manifests, enabling 80% zero-downtime rollouts. Local CI mimicked prod for 50+ devs.
    • Impact: Sped up releases by 30%.
    • Example: A healthcare app deploys 20 updates/week with ArgoCD.
• Benefits of Production Parity and Local Workflows:
  • Reliability: Cuts 50% of production bugs with aligned environments.
  • Efficiency: Saves 20–30 hours/week on local setup and debugging.
  • Scalability: Supports 1,000+ microservices across dev and prod.
  • Cost Efficiency: Offshore development in Vietnam ($20–$50/hour via InApps) saves 20–40% vs. U.S./EU ($80–$150/hour).
  • Agility: Enables 30% faster iterations with CI/CD.
• Challenges:
  • Complexity: Managing Kubernetes and Cloud Foundry adds 15% overhead.
  • Tool Learning: Telepresence or Skaffold require 1–2 weeks to master.
  • Resource Needs: Local clusters consume 10% more dev machine resources.
  • Drift Risks: 5% of environments diverge without strict IaC.
• Security Considerations:
  • Encryption: Use TLS for data and AES-256 for secrets.
  • Access Control: Implement RBAC and MFA for clusters and CI/CD.
  • Compliance: Ensure GDPR, HIPAA, or SOC 2 for local and prod data.
  • Example: InApps secures a Cloud Foundry setup with RBAC and Vault, meeting SOC 2 standards.
• Use Cases:
  • E-commerce: Align dev and prod for 100K+ transactions/day.
  • Fintech: Ensure secure APIs across environments.
  • SaaS: Accelerate local dev for 50+ microservices.
  • Healthcare: Maintain HIPAA compliance in dev and prod.
  • Media: Streamline workflows for 1M+ video requests.
• InApps Technology’s Role:
  • Leading HCMC-based provider with 488 experts in Cloud Foundry, Kubernetes, and DevOps.
  • Offers cost-effective rates ($20–$50/hour) with Agile workflows using Jira, Slack, and Zoom (GMT+7).
  • Specializes in production parity, integrating Minikube, Telepresence, ArgoCD, and Prometheus for seamless workflows.
  • Example: InApps aligns a U.S. SaaS client’s dev and prod environments, reducing bugs by 40%.
• Recommendations:
  • Standardize environments with Kubernetes and Cloud Foundry for 95% parity.
  • Use Telepresence or Skaffold for efficient local workflows.
  • Automate with IaC and CI/CD for consistent, rapid deployments.
  • Partner with InApps Technology for cost-effective cloud-native solutions, leveraging Vietnam’s talent pool.

Read more about Achieving Production Parity and Local Development Workflows on Cloud Foundry with Kubernetes – InApps at Wikipedia

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Close to the end of a very eventful 2020, a spontaneous conversation on social media caught my attention. Many interesting aspects about Cloud Foundry came forth in the banter that followed, but one particular aspect touched a nerve.

Ram Iyengar

Ram is an engineer by practice and an educator at heart. He was (cf) pushed into technology evangelism along his journey as a developer and hasn’t looked back since! He enjoys helping engineering teams around the world discover new and creative ways to work.

That exchange was referring to using Cloud Foundry locally and testing apps with a cf push experience on a developer machine. This post is meant as a response to these folks. We will acknowledge the vantage point from which these observations are made, show how Cloud Foundry is evolving to resolve the problem, and what the solution looks like.

But first: what does it mean to “use locally” and “install on your laptop”?

Any developer — enterprise or otherwise — would like feedback about the software they just wrote. Running their applications locally provides instant gratification, which is very important from the perspective of closing the feedback loop and ensuring the application works.

While these phrases — at a microscopic level — simply refer to ways by which to run apps locally on dev machines, they’re representative of a much larger and important goal — that is Production Parity. Keeping development environments as congruent to production environments as possible helps in many ways, fundamentally by preventing the (in)famous “it works on my machine” problem.

Source: turnoff.us

The 12-factor methodology advocates for dev/prod parity and also identifies the many ways in which dev environments may move away from production ones. The three reasons outlined are: time gap, personnel gap, and tools gap. Engineering teams benefit enormously from keeping dev environments the same as production environments. In creating the aforementioned feedback loop, sometimes developers tend to bend the rules around tooling and, in the interest of building a fast(er) feedback loop, end up creating an environment that is rather different from what runs upstream.

Several PaaS tools have adopted different ways to help provide parity between local dev and production environments. Some examples are OpenShift and MiniShift, Lando, Kalabox (Nanobox), Vagrant for PHP specifically, and the list goes on. Cloud Foundry (BOSH-based) also has a solution for this in the form of cf dev, but again, the similarity with production environments was considerably low. In spite of using these PaaS tools, the similarity between dev and prod has always left a lot to be desired.

By providing a complete abstraction over underlying infrastructure, Kubernetes provides a succinct advantage for developers. Applications will behave the same way when deployed to Kubernetes running on any infrastructure. Using Kubernetes on dev, staging, testing and production environments helps greatly with dev/prod parity. On the flip side, this introduces a quantum of complexity when deploying applications. And this affects small teams in a big way. Numerous examples of rising complexity in Kubernetes-based deployments are available.

Both Kubernetes and PaaS tools solve these problems to some extent, individually. Together, there seems to be a converged experience that might be the perfect developer experience, with a near-100% parity between dev and prod.

The evolution of Cloud Foundry to incorporate Kubernetes within its architecture was a paradigm shift. Cloud Foundry can now help provide its time-tested developer experience across a much broader range of infrastructure, by being able to connect to Kubernetes endpoints. This effort has taken shape as the cf-for-k8s project and it passed the important 2.0 milestone recently. With cf-for-k8s, developers can deploy their apps using cf push to Kubernetes-based infrastructure. This colophon will remain true irrespective of what target instance they’re using.

The uniform cf push experience can be a reality along the CI/CD pipeline and consequently test, staging, pre-production and prod environments will all deploy using the same set of commands; and build immutable artifacts using the same underlying tools, thereby providing the best dev/prod parity possible.

Without losing focus on the problem of local cf-based deployment, here’s a quick start guide for those interested in experiencing Kubernetes-based deployments locally using cf push.

Prerequisites

You will need the following tools to be able to complete a local installation of cf-for-k8s. Installation instructions have been linked to each of the tools listed.

Predominantly, the installation instructions follow the same process as you would install to any cloud-based Kubernetes cluster (GKE, DigitalOcean, Azure). There are slight variations, which are indicated below as appropriate.

This will give you a local Kubernetes cluster, which will have a Cloud Foundry PaaS experience on top of it. We believe this combination is very powerful, simple, and provides a complete developer experience — including the dev/prod parity that is a critical part of the developer workflow. It also solves the historically difficult problem of having a local Cloud Foundry deployment.

cf-for-k8s makes local development simple for all kinds of developers. This method of installing cf-for-k8s on local dev machines is endorsed by our community of open source contributors, commercial Cloud Foundry vendors such as VMWare Tanzu, and our system integrators.

Join our Slack community to collaborate with our contributors directly. You can also reach out to us on our Twitter and LinkedIn handles.

Lead image via Pixabay.

Source: InApps.net